Inside a Surrey ‘Local News’ Site Run by AI

It looked like Surrey Speak had a scoop.

This month, the Surrey, B.C.-based website reported Vancouver politician William Azaroff had resigned from his role as executive director of a municipal party over a slew of scandalous resurfaced Tweets.

Surrey Speak didn’t say what Azaroff supposedly wrote, but reported it had to do with “issues of race, Indigenous identity and political ideology.”

Azaroff, Surrey Speak reported, had issued a regretful statement, and his party had promised to chart a new direction.

But none of that actually happened.

Azaroff never stepped down as the executive director of his party, OneCity. He couldn’t, because he has never held that position. He didn’t resign from anything. In fact, he had just been named the party’s mayoral nominee in an upcoming election.

As for the Tweets? Azaroff, a mild-mannered man who runs a non-profit housing development company, said he had never written anything resembling what Surrey Speak described.

“The least bit of scrutiny would show you that it’s not true,” Azaroff said. His team thought it might have been a politically motivated hit. But even that seemed far-fetched.

“If an opponent did this, they wouldn’t get this so obviously wrong,” Azaroff said.

On Facebook, Surrey Speak tells its more than 10,000 followers that it is a news website spotlighting “real people, real issues and real change.”

In reality, an Investigative Journalism Foundation or IJF investigation has found the website’s content appears to be largely generated by artificial intelligence and is laden with factual inaccuracies. The website also published AI-generated imagery based on real events, including an altered portrait of a murder victim.

Surrey Speak appears to have deleted the Azaroff story and several images from its website after the IJF asked about them.

Surrey Speak does not identify its owners, nor do any of the “journalists” authoring its stories appear to be real people. Online, it’s listed as a project of a mysterious company called “Network 247,” which itself doesn’t list any owners or operators.

But the IJF has found evidence that appears to link Surrey Speak to an Indian-Canadian entrepreneur and his AI tech company, which operates in both India and Canada.

That company, ADGTech, claims on LinkedIn that it employs more than 200 people. It has also won support from Simon Fraser University’s tech accelerator fund. The IJF found numerous apparent connections between that company and Surrey Speak, including shared phone numbers, email addresses, job postings and through a phone call to an ADGTech director.

But ADGTech spokesperson Vivek Kumar told the IJF his company does not “operate, manage or exercise editorial control over Surrey Speak.” He did not respond to followup questions about the many apparent links between his company and Surrey Speak.

Researchers say Surrey Speak is one of thousands of such AI-generated news websites cropping up across Canada and the world. Angela Misri, an associate professor of journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University, said the consequences are enormous.

By spewing out what she calls “AI slop,” Misri warns, such sites are making it even harder for people to separate fact from fiction. And in the process, they are eroding the already fragile trust the public places in the media.

“People don’t understand that news is not the same as just content. And these are just content farms of garbage,” Misri said.

“This is actually competing with the newsrooms for the attention of our supposed audience. We’re going to see a lot more of this. AI slop generates more AI slop.”

A sea of slop

If they were real, the writers of Surrey Speak would be prolific.

“John N.,” who wrote the piece on Azaroff, published six other stories that same day. He and other writers — with names like “Lucas,” “Riley Anderson” and “Ellie Jones” — publish a full slate of stories each day, many of them based on news events in and around Metro Vancouver.

The website does not disclose its use of artificial intelligence to create stories, nor does it provide any contact information for those writers. Since the IJF began asking questions, the site has now begun labelling some images as "AI-generated."

Dimitris Dimitriadis, the director of research and development at the New York-based company NewsGuard, said that’s typical in the more than 2,600 AI-generated news websites that he has catalogued over the past three years.

Dimitriadis, whose company markets reliability assessments for news services, said AI-generated news websites usually work by scraping reputable news sources for stories and then spitting out summaries.

Sometimes, the people behind those sites want to spin fabulist claims, or promote a given political viewpoint, Dimitriadis said. But more often, they’re just out to make money.

Journalism is not known as a profitable industry. But with zero overhead, AI news websites can still make a buck from online advertising, provided they get enough page views.

Surrey Speak does not have advertising on its page. But it does list a “marketing” email on the website, indicating it is seeking advertisers.

“The more articles you churn out, essentially you only need one of them to go viral. You don’t need all of them to go viral. And if you get one viral article that gets a lot of views, a lot of page impressions, you’re well on your way to making something that is self-sustaining, and maybe even profitable,” Dimitriadis said.

Those articles, Dimitriadis said, tend to be generic, formulaic and vague. They’re light on quotes, citations or specific information. They usually don’t credit the actual news organizations that obtained the information, and they frequently fail to tell their readers that they are using artificial intelligence.

In some cases, the stories contain significant factual errors.

A recent story by “John N.,” for example, falsely claimed unionized Amazon workers at a warehouse in Delta, B.C., had won a major pay increase through collective bargaining.

In reality, those workers have never signed a collective agreement. They did get a raise, but only because their union successfully complained to a tribunal that Amazon unfairly passed them over for a pay bump that had already been given to other, non-union workers.

So why had Surrey Speak published such a wildly false story about Azaroff? Dimitriadis suspects the AI detected the trending news about his mayoral nomination victory and spun it into a story.

“If the topic is trending, and it’s garnering a lot of SEO, those sites will use that topic to create content about it. And it could just be completely meaningless or even false,” Dimitriadis said.

It wasn’t just text that Surrey Speak fabricated. A search of the site’s source code reveals that at least some of the images it publishes appear to have been created by ChatGPT.

Some of those creations border on the comic. A recent story on the B.C. budget featured an altered image of a $1,000 Canadian bill, an extremely rare denomination that hasn’t been legal tender for over five years.

But in other cases, Surrey Speak appears to publish AI-generated images that are based on real victims of crime.

A recent Surrey Speak story about a violent robbery in New Westminster, B.C., featured a picture of an elderly woman fighting off an attacker in a grey hoodie.

That robbery did happen. But Suki Sadhre, the victim’s son, told the IJF the woman pictured in Surrey Speak’s story was not his mother.

Surrey Speak also recently reported on the sentencing of Everton Downey, a B.C. man who was convicted of murdering his 25-year-old girlfriend Melissa Blimkie in 2025.

Surrey Speak’s article featured an AI-generated photo of Blimkie. The IJF checked the authenticity of the image through two separate AI-detection tools, and Dimitriadis further verified it against Hive, a service used by NewsGuard. All three said the picture was AI-generated.

The IJF also contacted a member of Blimkie’s family, who said the use of the image was “concerning.”

Those mistakes, Misri said, are not easily erased. Once a false claim is on the internet, she said, it could be gobbled up and used in content by another AI engine, all without catching the error.

“Whether they got it from Reuters or they got it from Facebook, they’re treating it all equally,” Misri said.

Azaroff, for example, worried the article published about him might appear in AI-powered searches on engines like Google.

“It bothers me because it’s so obviously either AI slop or just intentionally misinformation. The timing seemed awfully suspicious,” Azaroff said.

Surrey Speak removed the article on Azaroff from its website on Feb. 23, 10 days after it was first published. It also removed the AI-generated photos of Melissa Blimkie and Sadhre’s mother after the IJF asked about them. Surrey Speak did not publish a retraction notice or a reason for removing those posts.

‘We prioritize ethical AI in all of our products’

Surrey Speak doesn’t identify any operators or owners. A listed phone number and email on its website did not respond to inquiries.

But the IJF found evidence that appears to link the website to ADGTech Solutions Inc. and its CEO, Anuj Sayal.

A former version of Surrey Speak’s website listed contact information that included the general Canadian mailbox for ADGTech. It also included a phone number also listed by ADGTech. And the website still lists an official address in downtown Vancouver that is also used by ADGTech.

Surrey Speak has since changed its online contact information to a different phone number — which is also used by ADGScribe, a project of ADGTech. Network 247 — which describes itself as “Canada’s fastest-growing digital influence network” — claims to reach millions of people in B.C. each month through a pair of curated social media pages called “I Love Vancouver” and “I Love Surrey.”

It lists Surrey Speak online as one of its projects. Network 247 also lists the same physical address as Surrey Speak, and previously said on its website that it was “powered by ADGTech.”

The IJF also phoned Pankaj Sayal, who is a listed director of ADGTech in B.C. along with Anuj Sayal.

Pankaj Sayal confirmed he was familiar with Surrey Speak and told the IJF over the phone that Anuj “is the one who looks after that.”

Network 247 also lists a second project called the “Maple Newswire,” whose website domain is also connected to ADGTech.

Anuj Sayal and ADGTech recently posted on LinkedIn advertising a job for “MaplePulse Network.” The job posting included a link to the Maple Newswire, which it advertised as “Canada’s fastest-growing digital influence and civic engagement platform” that uses “proprietary AI-driven tools” to help brands and public figures “trend across communities.”

ADGTech, though, denied any connection to Surrey Speak.

Vivek Kumar, who describes himself on LinkedIn as ADGTech’s head of enterprise and public sector development in New Delhi, India, told the IJF that “any suggestion of corporate or operational involvement by ADGTech is incorrect.” The IJF contacted Anuj Sayal several times for this story via email and through phone calls to various associated numbers but did not hear back.

Sayal is an Indian-Canadian tech entrepreneur who has founded a number of Canadian and Indian companies specializing in technology and, recently, in artificial intelligence.

ADGTech has received support from Simon Fraser University’s VentureLabs, which describes itself as “Vancouver’s top tech accelerator.” Its website says it offers support, including mentorship, investor access and funding to secure intellectual property.

ADGTech’s listed physical address — also the one listed by Surrey Speak — is a co-working space operated by SFU VentureLabs in downtown Vancouver. The IJF visited that location, which is an office and co-working space. A receptionist said that ADGTech does not actually rent that location and that neither Surrey Speak nor Network 247 were affiliated with VentureLabs.

In a 2025 online profile for VentureLabs, Sayal said ADGTech began as a marketing firm and was now focused on offering “detailed insights for businesses looking to grow online” via AI.

He stressed the company’s focus on the careful use of that technology.

“At ADGTech, we prioritize ethical AI in all of our products,” Sayal said.

SFU VentureLabs did not answer any of the IJF’s questions about what support it had given to ADGTech or if it was aware of Surrey Speak. SFU spokesperson Jeff Hodson referred all questions to ADGTech.

Dimitriadis, a former PR rep turned journalist, said he is concerned by the growth of sites like Surrey Speak, particularly over the past year. He posits that by competing with real news outlets for limited advertising revenue, they’ll tighten the financial squeeze on reputable journalistic publications.

“I think part of the challenge, for me, is trying to figure out how to prevent those sites from gaming the ad industry and misleading actual brands into thinking that this is a legitimate place for their ads to be on,” Dimitriadis said.

For Misri, the risk is more philosophical.

As AI-generated content occupies more and more of the internet, Misri worries engines will eat less real news and start feeding on each other's content. The result would be a sea of “slop” that gets further and further from fact.

“The truth is becoming a minority on the internet. And that’s the scary part,” Misri said.